British engineer quizzed over Cyprus air crash

A British engineer is due to be questioned today over his inspection of a Cypriot aircraft which later crashed, killing all 121 people on board.

Alan Irwin and fellow Briton Malcolm Fowler were members of a team of engineers who checked the Helios Airways aircraft before it took off on its doomed flight last month.

They were due to meet the head of the Greek air safety board Akrivos Tsolakis at the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch headquarters in Aldershot, Hants.

Mr Irwin insisted at the weekend that he had nothing to fear from the inquiry.

The Sunday Times said a leaked technical report found that the engineers who inspected the aircraft left a knob used to control cabin pressure in the wrong position after their safety check.

But Mr Irwin told the paper: "The engineers have nothing to hide, they have no worries. The (Helios) aircraft that were out there ... were absolutely first-class, very good airplanes."

The AAIB confirmed last week that Mr Tsolakis would meet the two engineers at its UK HQ.

But an AAIB spokesman would not confirm reports that the two men did not want to travel to Greece to be questioned, fearing for their safety.

All 115 passengers and six crew on Helios Flight 522 were killed when the Boeing 737-300 flying from Larnaca to Athens hit a mountainside 25 miles north of the Greek capital on August 14.

Mr Irwin cleared the aircraft for take-off after reportedly being unable to find the cause of a fault reported by the crew who had flown the jet from London to Cyprus on its penultimate journey.

He was also reportedly the last person to have had radio contact with the aircraft's German pilot, who had reported an air-conditioning problem seven minutes after take-off.

Controllers lost contact with the aircraft shortly afterwards and investigators believe the pilot and co-pilot lost consciousness, possibly after the air pressure system and the back-up

oxygen supply failed.

The aircraft flew on autopilot for almost three

hours before running out of fuel and crashing into a hill north of Athens.

Mr Tsolakis said last week he believed that the engineers had important information that could help to explain the mystery of the crash.

He said: "Mr Irwin didn't want to fly to Cyprus so we are coming to London as he could be very enlightening in certain aspects. We don't care if we have to go to Antarctica, we just want to do our job."